The Other Inconvenient Truth

Check out this interesting talk by Jonathan Foley on what he calls "The other inconvenient truth"

Oysters on the Thin Shell

Climate change is not the only worrisome potential consequence of releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.  As the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increases, the amount that dissolves into the world's oceans also increases making ocean water more acidic.  It is an introductory chemistry lesson on a giant scale.  You can read a nice synopsis of the process here.  This acidification can have a range of disquieting, but not very well understood impacts.  This story in today's Oregonian describes one of them: declines in shellfish populations.

The Corner Greenhouse

As we will talk about in the later weeks of the course, there has been a recent resurgent interest in urban agriculture in the U.S.....everything from household scale gardens and poultry raising to commercial scale production of a sometimes surprising scale.  Check out this interesting story from the NYT

Keeping Food on the Table

This New York Times Op-Ed piece draws attention to a new report called called “Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change”  It is a compelling read (for a report!), and although it takes as its theme the threat climate change poses to our food supply, many of the issues it discusses are more systemic....such as the meat loving diets of wealthy countries.